Eric Bahn

Bahn, Elizabeth Yin, and Shiyan KohShiyan KohShiyan Koh is a Singapore-based venture capitalist and co-founder and General Partner of the early-stage investment firm Hustle Fund.Open the full entry are friends who met in the dorms at Stanford University; more than twenty years later, the three ran Hustle Fund together.⁠[1]

He worked as a product manager at Facebook. There, some of the engineering and product teams he worked with wrote code, shipped features, and learned ten times faster than other teams, and some of their members had only a high school education yet outperformed teams with elite credentials; this upended his assumptions about high-performing teams and shaped his later approach to investing as an angel and a venture capitalist. Early in his career as a product manager, he reached out to a founder he had read about on Hacker News and swapped his product management expertise for advisory shares, writing requirements docs, running customer discovery interviews, and helping recruit for the company; the company later had an exit, and those shares were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.⁠[2][3][3][3][3][4][4][4][4]

In 2017, Bahn was an entrepreneur in residence on 500 Startups’ Mountain View team, describing himself as an entrepreneur with one exit and an occasional angel investor. That year he looked at the pre-seed round of the crypto tax tool CoinTracker but passed because of a valuation disagreement (he offered $4 million, while the founder wanted $6 million) and because he underestimated the growth potential of the crypto market at the time; in early 2022, he saw that CoinTracker’s latest round valued the company at $1.3 billion. He later concluded that when looking at a market, one should ask whether something true today will still be true tomorrow, and whether something not true today will become true tomorrow.⁠[2][2][2][5][5][5][5][5][5]

In 2017, Bahn, a former 500 Startups partner, and Elizabeth Yin launched the pre-seed investment firm Hustle Fund, aiming to level the playing field for entrepreneurs by focusing on founders’ potential impact rather than on whether they came from Stanford or an Ivy League school. According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the fund sought to raise $50 million and planned to invest about $25,000 each in 150 to 200 pre-seed companies, coaching founders one-on-one for two to six weeks on customer development, sales funnels, metrics and measurement, and lead generation. The pair’s departure from 500 Startups came amid the controversy over sexual misconduct allegations against its founder Dave McClure, but they had already been planning to leave and start their own fund.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6]

Bahn defines “hustle” as great execution meeting high velocity, specifically exceptional productivity, rapid learning, and a relentless focus on metrics; this is where Hustle Fund’s name comes from. He values founders who build in public, offer transparent investor updates, and continually experiment and measure.⁠[3][3][3][3]

On September 12, 2018, Hustle Fund closed its first fund at $11.5 million, with limited partners including Shanda, LINE, and Naver; the fund had already invested in 40 companies and added Shiyan Koh as a general partner, based in Singapore to expand the firm’s reach in Southeast Asia.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

Bahn invested in Webflow very early, valuing its founders’ approach of choosing independent web designers as their target users and building an email list of hundreds of thousands of people before converting them into customers; Webflow reached a $4 billion valuation in 2022. Rupa Health, which he invested in, was founded by Tara Viswanathan and acquired in 2024. Bahn also co-created Angel Squad with Elizabeth Yin, Shiyan Koh, and Brian Nichols, enabling people who traditionally lack access to high-quality startup investment opportunities, and who invest no more than $5,000 per company, to take part in angel investing. As of October 2026, Hustle Fund has backed more than 600 startups, and Angel Squad has more than 2,000 angel investors.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][1][1][8]

Hustle Fund: Official website: https://www.hustlefund.vc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ericbahn (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericbahn/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]